A Black Man Talks of Reaping

By Arna Bontemps 1902–1973 Arna Bontemps

I have sown beside all waters in my day.

I planted deep, within my heart the fear

that wind or fowl would take the grain away.

I planted safe against this stark, lean year.

I scattered seed enough to plant the land

in rows from Canada to Mexico

but for my reaping only what the hand

can hold at once is all that I can show.

Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields

my brother's sons are gathering stalk and root;

small wonder then my children glean in fields

they have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit.

Arna Bontemps, “A Black Man Talks of Reaping” (1926). Copyright 1926 by Arna Bontemps. Reprinted with the permission of Harold Ober Associates, Incorporated.

Source: American Poetry: The Twentieth Century Volume 2 (2000)

Biography

Like his close friend Langston Hughes and their fellow writers in the Harlem Renaissance, Arna Bontemps explored African-American experience in a wide variety of genres. As a poet, novelist, historian, anthologist and archivist, he enriched and preserved black cultural heritage.

Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, but moved with his family to Los Angeles at age three. After graduating in 1923 from Pacific Union College, . . .

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